Bill Kristol, who might perhaps be considered the heir to his father’s mantle, could be considered a good example of what they do and how they operate. Kristol is inter alia the founder and editor of the political magazine The Weekly Standardand a regular commentator on the Fox News Channel.

In addition to his advocacy on behalf of Chechnya, Kristol is associated with a number of prominent conservative think tanks, including the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, where he serves on the Leadership Council. He was chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle during the presidency of George H. W. Bush and later served as chairman of the New Citizenship Project from 1997 to 2005. In 1997, he was a co-founder of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) with fellow neocon Robert Kagan. A director of the Foreign Policy Initiative, Kristol is also one of the three board members of Keep America Safe, co-founded by Liz Cheney and Debra Burlingame, and is on the board of the Emergency Committee for Israel.

Kristol believes that some people who kill children are not really terrorists because it very much depends on who is being attacked. On March 29, 2010, after two Chechen women suicide bombers set off huge explosions in subway stations in central Moscow, killing more than three dozen people, he said that the Russians “in some ways have brought” the terrorism “on themselves,” a judgment that he would be unlikely to make regarding either Israel or the United States.

In March 2011, Kristol penned an editorial for The Weekly Standard entitled “The Party of Freedom.” It was written on the eve of the U.S. intervention in Libya. It begins “And so, despite his doubts and dithering, President Obama is taking us to war in another Muslim country. Good for him.” It goes on to claim “Our invasions have in fact been liberations…in our own national interest, of course, but also to protect Muslim peoples and help them free themselves. Libya will be America’s fifth war of Muslim liberation.”

One is tempted to ask what American interest was served by invading Libya and to challenge how much “Muslim liberation” Kristol really wants to see as truly free Muslims might not like Israel a whole lot. The idiocy of his panegyric on America’s willingness to go to war to fix the Muslim problem is actually quite sickening but it is the same logic that places Kristol at the head of an organization that supports terrorism as long as it is directed against someone else, in this case Russia. The essential contradiction of American foreign policy neocon style is on open display and one has only to ask why Kristol does not consider the two young Chechens in Boston to be freedom fighters when they set off a bomb that blew up an eight year old boy. The carnage that Kristol and his friends have been cheerleading in a series of Muslim countries has borne bitter fruit and perhaps it’s time to end the hypocrisy.

Mark: Virtually all of your criticisms about conservatism in America (“The Thing That Used to be Called Conservative”, or whatever you call it) can be laid squarely at the feet of these neo-cons, who are still Marxists in ethics, anthropology, and sociology, and are big government Keynesians, economic globalists, and military imperialists in the spirit of the Internationale.

I have no problem with your calling out these distortions, but I’d encourage you to more surgically attack the enemy, rather than the sort of broad brush approach you seem to frequently use.

Pax.

Marthe Lépine

There are a few quotes from the complete article that are interesting in themselves, such as:

“(Professor Leo) Strauss (who had a strong influence on those neocons that Kristol father was part of) taught that the “perpetual deception of the citizens by those in power is critical because they need to be led, and they need strong rulers to tell them what’s good for them.”

and

“The neocon foreign policy team always advocates using maximum military force whenever a threat surfaces, unless one is designated a freedom fighter a la the Chechens…”

On the other hand, in another article that I received through my e-mail, there was this idea:

“It’s utterly unlikely the young Boston bombers were on the CIA payroll, but it’s more than likely the elder brother’s connections (,,,) in Central Asia could be traced back to US-protected killers of years past. The sleight-of-hand to keep public eyes off the US juicing Chechen terror is almost fun to watch…”
Source: Palast reports from Kazakhstan:
FBI Spiked Chechen Jihadi Investigation
By Greg Palast from Vice.com UK (Friday, 3. May 2013)

which might explain why someone in high place decided to ignore a warning from Russia about that particular young man…

Pavel Chichikov

Did the children slaughtered at Beslan bring it on themselves?

Challenge the Russians on their turf and you will be torn limb from limb. Anyone who knows anything about how Russia wages war would know that. In fact, the Chechen leader in the first Chechen war, Dudayev, was a former Soviet military officer who flew strategic bombers. They blew him apart by homing in on his phone.

After Beslan, Putin said on TV: We will follow them anywhere, even into the ****house.

He is said to have regretted his language afterwards, but perhaps only the language.

For this comment I am going to just assume that your bill of indictment against Kristol is entirely right. No argument about it here, just assume your points are correct. Your moral calculus makes me worry for you.

How do you put Bill Kristol in as wronger that Peter Singer, who advocates infanticide, Saddam Hussein, who ran a brutal dictatorship but couldn’t figure out that after 9/11 the rules changed, Stalin, Hitler, Vlad Tepes, Pontius Pilate, Caligula, the list goes on and on. You have a particular dislike for a person, an ideology, a particular grouping. I can understand that. But you’re losing all perspective.